Sliding dancers and murderous mythical heroines — reviews

GöteborgsOperans Danskompani

Sadler’s Wells, London

Many dance stages have a rake that tilts the performance towards the stalls and helps the sightlines. Three or four degrees (Bolshoi, Mariinsky) can be quite scary to negotiate; 34 degrees isn’t so much a rake as a red run. Damien Jalet’s Skid (2017), which had its London premiere at Sadler’s Wells last Thursday, is performed on Jim Hodges’s vast 10-metre-square slide by a cast of 17. One by one figures appear at the top of the incline then lie supine on the white vinyl surface, inching glacially downward while the soundtrack by Christian Fennesz and Marihiko Hara carries out an extensive (but inconclusive) search for the Lost Chord.

The outfits, by fashion designer Jean-Paul Lespagnard, include salopettish trousering with discreet rubberised patches that halt the slide. Gradually the pace increases, the dancers scuttling under the structure and re-emerging at the summit in a kind of clown-car continuum. Descending bodies slither between open legs or cannon into one another, dragging their new friends into the void below. I began to wonder what kind of landing pad they used, how many square centimetres of rubberised cloth are needed to retard the fall of 60 kilos of muscle. Then I began wondering if I had left the iron on.

Jalet enjoys exploring “dance in relationship to the visual arts”, but share your stage with too big an installation — as he did with the 20-foot foam blob in 2016’s Vessel — and the movement is overwhelmed and it all looks a lot like a gimmick. Eventually the last man stripped off and leapt from the summit. An ending of sorts, but it felt unearned.

★★★☆☆

Dismantling the set took the best part of an hour then back into the auditorium for Saaba by Israeli dancemaker Sharon Eyal. Her 45-minute ensemble deploys 13 tireless and committed artists dressed in textured fleshings by Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri who teeter around on Eyal’s trademark three-quarter pointe as if wearing invisible Louboutins.

The feet are in sync, the bodies more free-form — imagine a Muybridge contact sheet shuffled out of sequence — but all remain slaves to the relentless pulse of Ori Lichtik’s trance-y playlist. In the programme notes one of the dancers asserts that in this 2021 piece Eyal “searches for something that hasn’t previously been seen or felt”. The search continues.

★★★☆☆

opera.se

Trajal Harrell: Porca Miseria

Barbican, london

Four hours is a major theatrical investment and Trajal Harrell’s triptych Porca Miseria doesn’t really justify the outlay. The three elements are intended to explore the significance and legacy of three women — black dance pioneer Katherine Dunham; the murderous Medea of Greek myth; and Maggie the Cat, anti-heroine of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — but this is not always apparent.

The first element, “Deathbed”, herds the audience on to the stage where Harrell and his 10 dancers raid the dressing-up box (as per 2017’s Hoochie Koochie), emerging from behind screens to catwalk about on tiptoe for 45 minutes in a bagwash of fun furs and florals. After an hour-long interval (why?) the audience is ushered back into the stalls seats to watch “O Medea”, a 25-minute film. The finale, “Maggie the Cat”, is intended to refocus Tennessee Williams’s play on the black servants in the Pollitt household but essentially involved the cast running riot in soft furnishings, gaffer-taping sofa cushions to their bodies for 60 minutes while Harrell and Perle Palombe chanted into their microphones.

Porca Miseria is widely admired and has moved grown critics to tears. It had its moments — Christopher Matthews schlockily compelling: part Mark Morris, part Divine — but after four hours I felt unable even to glimpse the remotest pattern in the melee.

★★☆☆☆

barbican.org.uk